Below are posts associated with the “Mormonism” tag.
🔗 linkblog: The LDS historical department just published an 1886 polygamy revelation
This is a big story, and I’m surprised it hasn’t gotten more news, even if it is a recent development.
📚 bookblog: The Mormon Jesus: A Biography (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)
This wasn’t quite what I was expecting (I think the “biography” subtitle is misleading), but it’s good! It’s organized around specific understandings or depictions of Jesus in Mormonism, and while it isn’t afraid of exploring the weird and controversial (I may be citing this at some point for a paper that touches on arguments about a polygamist Jesus), it’s also good about contextualizing Mormon beliefs within broader trends, thereby making (some) things (slightly) less weird.
📚 bookblog: Visions in a Seer Stone: Joseph Smith and the Making of the Book of Mormon (❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤)
This book makes an interesting, important, and compelling argument. I find it personally interesting, and it will be useful for a conference paper that I’m thinking of putting together next fall (it turns out that Jacques Ellul’s ideas overlap with the Book of Mormon in interesting ways!).
If I’m hard on the book, it’s because that argument feels scattered. While I appreciate the mountain of sources that the author draws on, I feel like a shorter, tighter book (or even article!
📚 bookblog: Wandering Realities: The Mormonish Short Fiction of Steven L. Peck (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)
I may no longer be a practicing Latter-day Saint, but this is the kind of cultural artifact that keeps me thinking of myself as Mormon. Peck’s writing—see also Heike’s Void, which I’d love to reread—depicts a beautiful Mormonism that I still feel connected to and that represents what the religion can be at its best.
That doesn’t mean I don’t have complaints about these stories. They’re very male-centered (I’m not sure any of them pass the Bechdel Test), and even though it’s one of my favorites in some ways, the story of the crafting of the Liahona bugs me for the way that it imposes Mormon theology on first temple Israelite religion, as Mormons tend to do.
📚 bookblog: Picks & Shovels (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)
I was intrigued when I heard that Mormonism would feature prominently in the third (but first?) Martin Hench book. Mormonism is hard to get right in fiction, and I wondered how Doctorow would do. The answer: Some things were off, but overall, he got things right. It nagged at me some, but overall, I appreciated his take.
That’s not the most important part of my review, but it’s representative of everything I want to say about this book.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Joseph Smith and the Mormons, by Noah Van Scriver
This is an excellent graphic novel adaptation of the earliest of Mormon history. The art is good, the story is compelling, and I enjoyed reading it. I came close to buying this twice in the past year after finding it in comics shops, and I was delighted to find that my local library had a couple of copies.
I do wish that I either knew a lot more history or a lot less history going into this.